It's over

Pablo Escobar's Edifício Monaco is gone.

The implosion impressed me. A klaxon warning followed by a sudden thud like a drumbeat against my chest. The instant vertical drop of the structure. A lazy cloud of concrete dust concluded it.

Precision work, expertly done.

Hundreds of people gathered on the streets and in the high-rises to watch. For a while I was able to get inside the cordons, pretend to be a photojournalist, and stand next to the engineers making final decisions. I pressed in and mingled with the Medellín reporters.

Eventually I was made, given a poorly-understood lecture in Spanish, and sent outside the cordons. Still not a bad view of the action. The headquarters of Escobar in his last days will soon become a family park.

That drug lord's empire is gone, but it was a lemonade stand next to the narco-traffic now flowing from Venezuela. And, like before, we in the USA are a fundamental part of it. And still too many continue to fund that blood-sodden pipeline of death. In the UK—as well as the US—large numbers of “woke” middle-class people take part. And call it a “party.” The party is with friends, but the murders are of distant strangers. Out of sight, out of mind.